This invention relates to trays which are designed to facilitate the sorting and distribution of mail.
At the present time, within Post Offices, postal employees sort mail for delivery by manually inserting the separate articles of mail (mostly envelopes) into pigeonholes formed within a cabinet. This cabinet is fixedly mounted within the Post Office. Each pigeonhole contains appropriate identifying indicia to denote the particular party to whom the mail located within that particular pigeonhole is to be delivered.
Once all the mail has been sorted, the mail is then removed from the pigeonholes and placed in unpartioned delivery trays. The trays containing the mail is then transported to a vehicle for delivery to the houses and commercial places of business on the postal route.
This conventional method of distribution of mail is a multi-step operation which physically requires: (1) sorting of the mail into the individual pigeonholes, (2) removing the sorted mail from the pigeonholes and arranging it in order in the unpartioned delivery trays, (3) resorting each piece of mail to ensure that all the mail addressed to a particular addressee is correctly delivered, and (4) placing all mail for each particular delivery in the addressee's mail receptacle. If just one of these steps could be eliminated, literally millions of dollars in labor expense could be saved each and every day because of the massive volume of mail that is delivered each day. This savings would be applicable only to the United States with similar savings obtainable throughout the rest of the world.